Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

  Over one hundred years since the opening for settlement, southwest Saskatchewan is still a thinly populated area and, despite all the certainty of various villages that one day they would be metropolises, it still does not have a single large city. Today the farms in the province have an average size of 1,668 acres — that is, almost three sections per family or corporation. People with that much land, given the current weather and improved agricultural practices, usually do very well. Nowadays, with the demise of the Wheat Board and the provincial wheat pools and the single-desk marketing system, this over the protests of the majority of farmers, as it puts business interests over those of the ordinary people who work the land, every farmer is pretty much on his own when it comes to selling his crops, and if he isn’t good with figures and computers, he doesn’t survive. Not only are there far fewer farms than before, but most of the open prairie, where plowing is a good deal easier than in forested lands where the tree stumps and roots have to be removed first, has been worked, changing the nature of the land forever.

  It clearly hadn’t occurred to Peter that he might be asking too much of me — trying to turn a non-agricultural person whose favourite field was the arts rather than wheat or hay, into a rural woman — and I had assumed that I would get along: I would make good friends; I would participate; I would enjoy myself; I would trade in the rigorous life of the single-parent, working woman in the intensely competitive world of the university, for life as a ranch woman. We were, both of us, completely out of our minds, and everybody could see that but us. At thirty-six and forty-one, respectively, we didn’t even have the excuse of being young.

  We would, before our wedding, in a decision that was agony for me, allow Sean to stay in the city with his father. He had told me close to the time we were to move south how very much he didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to lose his friends or his coaches. He wanted to see his father regularly. I had had misgivings all along about putting a city child into the country milieu, and although I had custody, I gave in. How many women have had to make that heart-rending choice, between their adolescent children and a chance at a new, satisfying life? I did not think I was making that choice, though. Our agreement was that all long weekends and holidays, including summer, he would spend with me.

  In the end, living without him was almost too hard. If I hadn’t known how well he was doing in school and in his sports activities, and how happy he seemed to be in his new home, I don’t think I would have lasted with Peter; I would have had to go back to the city.

  Some feminist theorists argue that to place the moral/ethical burden of such choices on just the mother is unfair. All I know is what I felt in my heart: a nagging guilt at leaving my son, even though he was happy.

  Imagine my first sight of Eastend: driving into the village of six hundred or so at dusk on a muddy Victoria Day weekend, to find a puzzlingly wide main street, on each side of which was a row of Western-style false-fronted small frame shops and cafés; I would learn to call the cafés Jack’s and Charlie’s and would never go into Charlie’s, as it was then frequented by men only, although on a sweltering summer day if I happened to be in town I might reach up from the sidewalk to buy a soft ice cream cone from its side window. On each side of the main block of the street, half-tons were parked nose-in, one after the other, with stock racks on their boxes, many with the motors running, so that clouds of pink-purple exhaust rose into the luminous sapphire of the evening, and the soft rumbling of the motors was (before everyone knew about global warming and climate change) a comforting, homey sound.

  I had arrived in a TR4 sports car driven by a professor of, as I recall, biology — his work involved the University of Saskatchewan’s electron microscope, one of the few then in the world and the size of a room (today most of them are merely desktop-size instruments) — with my twelve-year-old son squeezed into the tight area behind us. We had come to see the ranch, owned and run by my “cousin” (we’d always referred to the family there as cousins, although my four sisters and I had never met them, and their relationship to us was distant), who had invited us. Or rather, we were invited by my forty-year-old bachelor cousin Peter, who owned and ran the family ranch started by his father and two uncles in the early part of the century and who wanted the chance to show it off to me.

  If it had been up to me I’d never have gone — what, me? A ranch? Why would I want to go to a ranch? But the professor and my son were both keen to go, Sean in particular jumping with eagerness to see a cattle ranch and real cowboys. The professor, who was from the British Isles, offered to drive us in return for the chance to see a real Canadian cattle ranch too. So I succumbed and off we went, on the wrong weekend, so that we weren’t expected, and when we arrived, we had some trouble locating our hapless host.

  To get to the ranch from Saskatoon, where both the professor and I taught at the University of Saskatchewan and he did research of some mysterious variety, you turned south at Rosetown, seventy miles west of Saskatoon, onto Highway 4 and kept going south for about 150 miles and then turned west, and eventually south for another maybe fifty miles before you went the last ten miles west again, and there you were, about fifteen miles north of the Montana border and about thirty from the Alberta border to the west: precisely in the middle of nowhere. Even today, with the advent of serious oil and gas exploration and extraction, a cyclic business if ever there was one, the ranch is still in the middle of precisely nowhere. That is, if by nowhere you mean acres and acres and acres with nobody living on it, no houses, no stores, no bars (as might be found if you were in Montana, where a mere crossroads might, in those days, have as many as four bars parked, one on each of its corners, despite there not being a single ranch or farmhouse in evidence anywhere near), and almost no traffic. A whole day might go by without a single vehicle passing on the sparsely graveled dirt road that ran past the buildings, and I can attest to this, as I would eventually spend many days there, mostly alone, watching for the single half-ton churning up a fat worm of yellow dust as it whined by, before the particles rose into a choking cloud, then thinned, and dissipated into the blue.

  But on that particular wrong weekend, we were heading for the hay farm, not the ranch. In fact, it was Peter who had made the mistake, and we discovered that when — this was pre–cell phones — we found a pay phone and reached him as he and his friends were taking a coffee break in the log house and thus, luckily, he heard the phone ringing. He said, “I did mean the twenty-fourth of May weekend, but I thought it was next week.”

  “No,” I pointed out. “This is the long weekend. It’s early this year.” Of course, with our jobs and school for my son, and the distance involved, we couldn’t have come on any but a long weekend. I think he was laughing then, and gave us instructions on how to reach the hay farm where he was, about ten miles southeast of Eastend. The instructions were, typically for Peter, casual as opposed to exact, but we didn’t know that then. It was a cold, rainy, windy weekend, but because of the ample spring rains that year, the landscape was intensely green. Although the road out of town — in those days a graveled, curving, uphill run between a dirt cliffside with a steep drop on the other side until you reached the plateau above the Frenchman River valley at the bottom of which the town was set — was wet, it was well enough graveled so as not to cause us serious trouble in our little car. It wasn’t until we hit the mile of dirt road on the Butala land that followed the river into the house yard (as opposed to the feed yard or the barnyard), that the professor required every ounce of his strength to hold the wheel where he wanted it, and all his skill as a driver to keep the car straight and moving ahead.

  The road was pure gumbo, a term that hadn’t meant much to me before I started driving around in the southwest. Gumbo is wet clay, and people were always joking that you had to drive in it because you couldn’t walk in it. You often couldn’t even stand up in it, it was as slippery as wet soap, and if you drove, your vehicle would sink in; it would gum up your wheels and fill the wheel wells u
ntil your vehicle came to a full stop and couldn’t move. That’s what happened to us. We had to struggle the rest of the way in to the house through the wind and rain, and later Peter and the professor would go out in a tractor and pull the car in. It was not the last time in the years I lived there that I would have to give up, get out, slam the truck door shut, and walk in.

  I would eventually learn that the only way to drive the gumbo roads without getting hopelessly stuck was to point your vehicle in the direction you wanted to go, put your foot pretty hard on the gas, and neither deviate in your course nor let up on the gas until you got to where you were trying to go. Only men, in those days, drove those roads in wet weather; it was the rare woman who would even try. Mothers, particularly, were afraid to have accidents that would hurt their children or render themselves incapable of looking after them. Not to mention that husbands tended to yell if they had to stop their work to pull you out of a ditch, or if you put dents in their vehicles. In this, Peter was a definite exception. He didn’t even make sarcastic remarks, or mutter sotto voce as he dragged out chains and put the heavy iron hooks on the axle or frame (never the bumper) or wrapped the chains around it. I only ever heard him yell at a horse once, and that was to make it stop as it raced, riderless, for an open gate. When he was in a confrontation with a neighbour who had a strong tendency to violence in order to clarify his opinions, Peter’s voice got softer, more conversational. The discussion was, of course, as any country person already knows, about fences.

  It turned out that the road we tried to drive down that day more than forty years ago wasn’t even a real road. I would find that out in later years, when I had grown to love the very dirt of it and the way it meandered carelessly along the river’s edge and where all one summer I watched a pair of giant owls nesting on the crumbling cliffside right below it, having learned that owls tended not to notice you if you were quiet enough, and peered over the edge down at them as they bobbled around, companionably making a nest. The “road” was merely a trail scraped out by the PFRA, referred to by everybody as “the PF.” PFRA stands for Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, a federal agency inaugurated in 1935 to help prairie farmers, some of whom were literally starving to death, as were their cattle and horses, with no crops to sell, their land blowing away, no rain for years, and, although it was cold in winter, hardly any snow either. In those grim days, farming practices were not yet sophisticated enough to allow for the conservation of soil and moisture. “The PF” was an odd-sounding name, I suppose, but perfectly reasonable to prairie people, and trailing a long, unspoken, and unhappy history. So the “road” we got stuck on that day was a PF trail, and part of the hay farm was part of the PF project.

  In fact, the entire valley in which the hay farm was situated and through which the small river ran from the PF dam at the western edge of town (the river started in the Cypress Hills and for the first years of settlement had been called the White Mud for the high-quality clay outcroppings along its banks), all the way to the town of Val Marie, nearly a hundred miles east and south, was an intermittent series of PF irrigation projects. Peter and his family had owned their hay farm since Peter was fifteen, and had gone through years of intense labour with equipment of a kind I’d never heard of, to level it and dike it and create on the valley bottom eventually about two hundred acres of flood-irrigable hay land. The trail along the river that we got so completely stuck in late that day was only a truck-width narrow trail running along the edge of the river that the PFRA ditchriders used to check the way the water was running in the fields as they were irrigated, sometimes to change “sets,” or to open and close headgates, and down which they could bring any needed machinery.

  It turned out there was another road, one that bisected the land itself with actual gravel on it, a municipal road engineered to be higher than the ditches, but Peter had neglected to mention it. I’ll never know if that was an accident or not, but he, like a lot of the other men of the area, liked people, especially city people, to know how bad the roads were. They wouldn’t make it easy for you. The provincial government did so little for them then, probably because the entire area held at that time a paltry 10,000 votes in total (and they tended not to be for the political party that was in power, as the prevailing mind-set in the southwest was Alberta- or American-style conservativism). They were quietly angry about this. They thought of themselves as men’s men, tough and capable and unfazed by mere bad to impassable roads — hadn’t their pioneering parents and grandparents braved much worse? They casually maneuvered what city people couldn’t handle. They were implacably tough and capable, as I would learn. The men among whom I would spend thirty-three years were physically strong and had become that way through simply living their lives working with cattle and horses; they often wore ragged and stained clothing because they did physical labour all day, much of it with machinery, and they had, as I would learn, built the world in which they lived: the roads, the crops in the fields, the corrals, fences, the water wells, sometimes even the houses they lived in.

  Even Peter’s generation, born in 1934, understood the world as having started from the way nature made it — long sweeps of grass, hills, rocks, burnouts and hardpan, an occasional patch of shrubs — and having to be scraped and dug out and built upon by their grandfathers and fathers and by themselves. They did not recognize an already built world; perhaps did not even care for one. I had come from such a world myself, but many years before, when I was a small child in the wilderness I had managed with ease to tuck it away in the far back of my brain, where I had intended never to bring it out again. The city, I was sure, was for me. Until I met Peter.

  I think we ate supper that first night in Jack’s Café, late at night, or it might be that we went to Peter’s parents’ house in town and his mother had supper, or at least a late lunch set out for us. I see flashes of this and that, remember a cowboy as we sat around at Peter’s mother’s house say something about not being “rarin’ n’ tearin’ to go,” at which the professor had to hide his laugh at such a quaint turn of phrase. A real cowboy turn of phrase, I guess it would have seemed to him, something he would never have heard in the UK. I remember, later that night, the stars; I thought I had never seen so many stars in my whole life crowded into one vast ink-dark sky, little flower-like clusters, single burning stars or planets, far and scattered pale bands of filmy white stars, and no other light at all except a sort of jury-rigged low yard light in front of the log house where we stayed, and in which Peter lived, that you had to switch on yourself before you went outside.

  We spent all the next day watching the men work. It was skilled work they were doing; you couldn’t just offer to help, because you had to be able to ride a horse, you had to be able to tell a steer from a cow or a bull, or indeed, a horse, and to recognize when to open a corral gate and when not to. It was all so strange to us that watching seemed the best bet, and it was so interesting that we didn’t ever find ourselves bored. The professor, a talented amateur photographer (this before digital photography), walked around taking pictures all day, changing lenses occasionally, and getting what I still think were some very good shots of my curly-haired boy clinging for dear life to the hoof of a calf that was about to be branded; me sitting on the high corral fence watching; the men roping, or just riding along through the tall grass on the riverbank, laughing together, one of them coiling his rope, another cupping his palm around his mouth in just such a way as to make a call we’d never heard before, neither a whistle, yodel, or shout, but a bit of a blend of all three, while ahead of them cows plodded along, and calves galloped their rocking-horse gait, and kicked up their heels in sheer delight at the world.

  Sometimes, when I think about that weekend as I do now, I think it was infused with a kind of magic, although it is so easy to use that word. It was otherworldly to the three of us, the greens greener than we had seen before, the muted melody of the narrow river more musical than other running streams, the ease of the men as if this we
re nothing at all, seated on their horses as if they had been born there, the wine-red backs of the Hereford cattle richly colourful against the grass and brownish-green water, even the creaking of the long wooden gates as someone pushed one open or dragged one shut telling us a new story. I was not cold, I was not sorry I’d come or eager to leave. We had come down that long road, driving for hours, and somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention and never expected it, had driven into another world.

  By the time it was over and we were in that speedy, romantic little car heading back to Saskatoon, I had parted ways with the professor and declared myself to be Peter’s — what? Girlfriend? I blush even now, at seventy-five, to think of it. Although the professor, whom I recently ran into again, now a married man with grown children and grandchildren, seems to have forgiven me. He went on to have an exotic life, which can’t be said of me, so perhaps he had long ago forgotten my perfidy. Or maybe he was graciously admitting that all is fair in war and love.

  I can remember clearly the explanation of what was going on in the corrals and why the animals were being brought in from the fields, sorted, and loaded into Peter’s four-ton truck to be driven off elsewhere. I don’t suppose it made much sense to me then, but it would become in time one of the two biggest events of our working year: In the late fall we would trail the cattle through the snow and cold from the far northeast corner of the ranch across frozen fields and down trails and roads to the hay farm in the valley, where we could look after them for the winter, and then — if things went as we wanted them to — we would trail them back again to the ranch for spring, summer, and fall. Each way was a three-day trek — usually during Christmas holidays so that Sean could take part — and required as many riders as we could snag and find horses for if they didn’t have their own. As you might expect, it was easy to find a crew to chase the cattle back south in the spring; in the dead of winter between Christmas and New Year’s to drive them north to the hay farm it was often impossible. More than once the crew consisted of Peter, me, and one old cowboy-rancher who drove the truck, and with whom Peter would confer occasionally as to how to solve a problem, or where the trail we were on broke and which way we should go. The knowledge, the wisdom of the old, despite the father-son battles over just about everything having to do with ranching, was greatly respected when I first went to the southwest to live. I loved that aspect of the culture, and regret that it has nearly vanished in cities, where the old are for the most part ignored, or treated by the young and sometimes even the middle-aged with a profound lack of respect.